Daniel Mietchen

“ This is worth reading again, with an appreciation of how central the peer review of grant proposals has been—and continues to be—to our research funding system.
D&D titled their article “Peer review for improving the quality of grant applications,” which is interesting from a transparency perspective. Peer review can only improve the quality of grant applications if there is some form of feedback between the proposal and the review process, either within one round of submissions, across rounds, or across funders. ”

“ According to GMK, funders “must embrace transparency more actively.” To me, this includes research funding mechanisms in general—from individual grants and their peer review up to entire calls and programs—as well as assessing their efficiencies [23] . In particular, “developing countries could leapfrog ahead by adopting from the start science grant systems that encourage innovation” [24] , and more systemic transparency may help overcome inequalities in terms of age [25] or other aspects of diversity [26] . ”

“ Other changes worth considering could include more transparency about the way funding calls or eligibility criteria are being designed, or to make public (and ideally machine readable) the data management plans now increasingly required for new proposals. ”